S1dd.com

Microsoft Announced Windows Mobile 7 Series at MWC today and the screenshots are nothing close to any leaked screenshots ever seen before.

And the announcement said that Phones with WinMo 7 will be available this holiday season. Just in time for my contract to expire and time to upgrade my HTC Touch Pro, which so far has been totally awesome. And thanks to the great folks at xda, I now have Windows Mobile 6.5 running on it with the latest installment of HTC Sense.

Looking a the WinMo demo presentation coverage at engadget, it looks like WinMo 7 is trying to do what phone companies like HTC and Samsung have been trying to do with Windows Mobile for ages. Create new an innovative interfaces while hiding the OS internals further.

Hopefully Windows 7 Series lives up to it’s expectations. Even if not, I’m sure HTC and other phone makers will make the best of it.

Home phone costs us way too much (about $40 including taxes – If we switch to a more basic phone plan, our DSL price goes up 10$ making it a wash) for the amount we use it. But getting rid of the phone is not an option because we do still use it some. Our Home security system and Dish Network box both need to be connected to a phone line.

Since naked DSL has fewer taxes, assuming we pay $15 more for DSL after we get rid of our phone line, that still leaves us $25/month extra. Now if we can find home phone service for free or nearly free, that would be nice. If we can call long distance and internationally for less than an arm and a leg and without extra fees, that would be even better.

The goal here is not saving money but to put the money saved to better use – faster DSL and/or HD on Dish without an increase in the monthly budget.

Here is what I came up with from my hunt:

1. Ooma
2. VOIP Adapter + Sipgate
3. Google Voice + Gizmo
4. Magic Jack
5. Skype

Ooma Telo and Ooma Telo Handset Bundle
Best Price $229.99

Privacy Information

Ooma

The first option Ooma has an upfront cost of $229 (this deal might be a limited time offer because the Handset + Base is cheaper than the Base alone) plus an additional cost of $40 to port your own number. Calling is free inside US and international calling rates are posted on Ooma’s website. Calling India, which is where I call most often is 10-17c/minute depending on where you call, which is relatively expensive. Also it seems Ooma adds a fee to the international rate so you have to pay more than the rate mentioned. After one year Ooma charges $11.75/yr for regulatory fees. That’s it. It’s free otherwise until you need to replace your unit.

The upfront cost is high but acceptable considering calling is virtually free. But I’m always wary that electronics fail the day their warranty ends. So even if this thing lasts two years splitting the cost (not including the number porting) over two years gives about $10/month.

Not bad. If the device lasts more than two years, well thats just a bonus.

VOIP Adapter + Sipgate (or other provider)

Sipgate.com provides you with one free phone number (no number porting yet) and may not be a local number until they rollout nationwide. To use Sipgate with your regular phone, all you need is a VOIP adapter. These things are cheap and can be bought for under $50.

Sipgate.com charges $1.90/month as an E911 fee and gives you 60 free minutes each month. Beyond the 60 minutes, calling costs 1.9c/minute inside US (calling toll free numbers is free) and international rates vary. Calling India is about 7c/minute, which is reasonable.

In our case, I’m not sure how often and how long the Dish Box stays connected but it seems it is less than a minute every night. Counting our own phone use I’d say we would probably never cross 500 minutes/month maybe not even that much. But lets say we do use 500, that would give us monthly costs of $9.50 + $1.90 = 11.40 and adding the VOIP adapter brings the total to $13.50, just a little more than the Ooma. Considering our usage, it is probably going to be less than this.

There are other VOIP call provers including free ones like ipkall (Washington state numbers only) and you may want to check those out too.

Google Voice + Gizmo5 + VOIP Adapter

Google recently acquired Gizmo and new signups are temporarily unavailable. Google Voice is a great option for incoming only calls. Gizmo lets you make outgoing calls and lets you use your google voice number. Since I don’t have a Gizmo account already, I can’t tell you much but calls under 3 minutes are free from Gizmo. Beyond that rates are 1.9c/min inside US and outside varies by country. India is 7c. Of course if you are online, you can login to google voice and have them make the call, which would make calling free.

Also with some hacks –  you can have free incoming and outgoing for a slight inconvenience. Also you can use other services instead of Gizmo5 and searching online will give you many different setup options and tricks. But since Gizmo has been acquired, I’d just wait a little for everything to settle because Google does have the habit of making things free and easy.

As far as cost goes, Gizmo + Google Voice, when it becomes available again will cost less than both the options above but I’m not sure you’ll get E911 service. Gizmo did recently make a deal with a company to provide E911 service but the cost was mentioned at $5.95/month. No idea what will happen when they relaunch.

Magic Jack

I don’t know why I put magic jack here because it is not even a viable option unless you already have a computer on full time. Magic Jack software is not easy to uninstall and pops up ads every time you make a call. It is by far the cheapest option. Magic jack costs $40 and includes one year of service. The second year costs $20. That makes it about $2.50/month. Calling India is 5c/minute.

Skype

Skype is a more interesting option than magic jack, but a little more expensive. As far as using the service goes there are many plans and options including pay as you go or unlimited for a monthly fee etc. Getting your own phone number is $60/year without a subscription or $30/year with a subscription. Subscriptions start at $3/month for unlimited US and Canada calling to $12.95/month for unlimited calling anywhere. You have two options to use Skype as your home phone. Buy a Skype handset or buy a skype USB adapter for your computer. With the USB adapter, you will need your computer on all the time like magicjack but that is not necessary with a skype handset.

So assuming the $3/month plan, Skype costs  $66/yr = $6.50/month. Adding the USB adapter makes it $8.50. Adding a handset makes it $11.50/month. Calling India costs 10c/min.

Ooma vs Sipgate vs GV + Gizmo vs Magic Jack vs Skype

So now for the final verdict. I’m in no hurry to decide so I’ll wait until Gizmo relaunches but in the current state here are the comparisons:

Cost (assumes all devices last two years)
Ooma – ~$10/month ($12 if port your number)
Sipgate – ~$13.50/month (assuming 500 minutes outgoing calls)
GV + Gizmo – ~$10/month (assuming 500 minutes outgoing)
Magic Jack – ~$2.50/month
Skype – $6.50 – $11.50/month

Pros and Cons

Ooma, Sipgate, GV + Gizmo do not require a computer to be on and you can use your existing phone with a VOIP adapter. Skype does not require a computer to be on if you get a Skype phone. If you don’t mind having your computer on always you can use either Skype or Magic Jack. If Ooma disappears, you will end up with an expensive brick. If Magic Jack disappears, a cheap brick. I doubt Skype will go anywhere but if it did, you’d have bricks too. Your VOIP equipment for the other two however will work with any VOIP provider.

One small company in Norway can produce a browser that is lightning fast works on almost any Operating System including most mobile phones but a giant like Microsoft with nearly limitless resources can’t even produce a browser in over 8 years (IE6 came in 2001) that is even remotely comparable to anybody else?

Now the IE Blog claims that IE9 will be better and they show a graph of how IE9 is worse than any browser out there (though better than IE8). They claim that it will be better in the future but how much better will everyone else be by the time IE9 comes out? Both Safari and Chrome use Webkit. Firefox and Opera use their own rendering engines.

Web apps are the present and the future. Everybody knows that. Also all web developers know that IE sucks so none of us use IE for anything except testing. IE is so bad that Google needed to launch a plugin that would make IE use Chrome to render web pages because there is no way some of their new and upcoming stuff would work in IE.

Back to the point. Why we web developers hate IE:

1. Everything we make generally works flawlessly in all other browsers without much effort. Then we look at it in IE and it is all messed up, especially if you use anything that is a relatively new thing. That means we need to add hacks specifically for IE.
2. All the versions of IE need their own hacks. But we can’t install multiple versions of IE on the same computer. So we have Virtual Machines or just separate computers or different members of our teams having different versions on their computers to test out.
3. Every new version of IE that comes out makes our code more convoluted thanks to checks for more versions of IE.
4. Sometimes no matter what you do, newer standards will just never make it to IE in the near future generally slowing down the progress of the web. Take for example the IE blog above. They add things like better font rendering, hardware acceleration (what good is hardware acceleration when it is accelerating something that is wrong?). The most important parts aka standards are ignored – see the 32/100 Acid 3 score. There is not even a mention of HTML5 etc.

If you read the comments, the most common comment is that Microsoft should give up on their rendering engine and just use webkit. I’m sure every web developer will jump for joy and host a party because the worst nightmare of their job – trying to be compatible with IE – will be gone. That is never going to happen so somebody summed it up in the comments:

IE is fairly analogous to the cockroach. You can step on it, blow it up and irradiate it, but now you have an annoyed radioactive abomination that’s going to go breed more annoyed radioactive abominations.

Thankfully a lot of major websites are dropping support for IE6 which hopefully will make those IE6 users out there upgrade or switch. But with IE9 there will be one more thing to test for. All of us developers want is for Microsoft to get out of the browser business. Why does Microsoft even bother spending millions of dollars to make an inferior product that is full of holes? Why can’t they just adopt the Google and Apple path of using a standard freely available engine and just improve the user experience? It can still be IE, but at least it will be a good one.

The only reason I can think that MS still works on IE is that it is integrated into everything – Windows, all their development tools and most Microsoft software somehow depends on IE. While I’m complaining here is one more – even Microsoft has a hard time developing complex apps that work in IE and other browsers. That’s why they have separate applications for Outlook web services for IE/non IE browsers.

The net is abuzz with news of Blockbuster’s new kiosks with SD card movie rentals and most people just panning the idea. But I think that it is great. Here is why:

• The kiosk doesn’t have physical media so it can potentially store millions of movies.
• The kiosk will never run out of a particular movie
• People can play the movies on their netbooks (no dvd drives but SD slots, yes) on the go or on their phones (iPhones need not apply) or cameras (if the media is playable on those) etc.
• A lot of modern DVD players and TVs come with built in SD card readers, I know my Bluray player has one.
• You don’t need to drive back to return the movie. Redbox = $1/night = $4 for 4 nights but this is just $1.99 because never have to return it.
• SD cards go all the way upto 32GB with new 64GB cards just coming out giving you the potential to rent 10 or more movies at a time in HD if the kiosk lets you.

What’s not to like about the idea? Hopefully Blockbuster’s implementation is good to start with.

It seems Blockbuster is trying to throw everything and the kitchen sink at Netflix and Redbox. First the in-store exchanges for online rentals, then not charging extra for BluRay, Redbox style kiosks, acquiring a company for movie downloads (though they are not free like netflix), following Netflix in trying to get Blockbuster’s app on various devices like Tivo and Samsung players and now this.

Hopefully something will work out for them.

Letstalk.com has the Droid and the Droid Eris for $50 less than Verizon and without any rebate forms to submit!

That makes the Droid $150 and the Droid Eris $50! Also use my link to letstalk.com and use coupon code “holiday” to get another 5% off.

I’m considering replacing my dying PC that I got in 2000. I spared no expense then to build a fancy rig with the latest processor and graphics card of the time. Now 9 years later the thing still works but is in dire need for replacement.

I no longer need the latest and greatest just a basic machine and I just found the perfect device today – ASRock’s Ion 330-BD. It is still not on the market and I can’t find a release date anywhere. Hopefully sometime soon.

I found this interesting quote from Microsoft:

Knowing the top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.

The first impression of this phone is great. It looks great – thin, sleek touchscreen, very responsive one at that but its drawbacks far outweigh it’s advantages.

The first Delve that we got had a bad battery which fully discharged in about 5 hours. So we returned that and got a new one. Alltel forces you to get a smartphone plan with the Delve but they admit that it is not really a smartphone. It does have some smartphone features like a full browser, GPS etc. but it is extemely limited in what it can do. Also it doesn’t use a standard usb charger!!

Browser: The browser on the Delve is Obigo, which is nice because most websites work well on it – notable exceptions are Facebook (not the mobile facebook). There is no Flash but then Flash on mobile phones is rare. Obigo is decent but is nowhere near Opera on my HTC Touch Pro (another post about this fantastic browser).

Apps: It is not possible to install any apps on this phone except the ones that Alltel gives you (Alltel Nav, Nutsie etc.). The browser will allow you to download all kinds of files but you cannot browse for or open those files. The phone only lets you browse media files (images and music). You can’t even delete other types of downloaded files form the phone memory. Alltel tech support recommends restting the phone if the memory gets full. I even tried getting the Samsung software that connects to Samsung phones but the Delve is not supported.

GPS: Forum discussions claim that Alltel Nav is free with the Delve but I confirmed from our business rep, two store reps, one customer service rep and two advanced tech support reps at Alltel that it is only free for a month. Anyway as a Nav program Alltel Nav is nice – it speaks street names and checks traffic. But I was pissed off that I couldn’t install my own GPS app.

Ringtones: The phone plays mp3 files but you cannot use them as ringtones. You can convert low quality mono files to the file format of the ringtones of the Delve and copy them over but it was such a PITA (the software is nearly impossible to find and you need more software too to convert your files to low quality WAVs) that it is totally not worth the effort.

Camera: AFAIR the Delve has a 2MP camera. It has no flash.

Touch: The touchscreen itself is very responsive and was easy to use and everything was clearly laid out.

The main stuff:Call quality was good and battery life was also good on the replacement phone.

Summary:This phone would have been great if it wasn’t crippled and Samsung/Alltel would let you install stuff on it because the hardware is capable. But as such this is just a basic phone with a browser and some fancy touch stuff with which you can’t really do much. The phone is totally not worth it if you are considering a smartphone plan and I really cannot recommend this phone. Parchayi returned her Delve and replaced it with a Blackberry Curve 8830 which she is very happy with.

Just got off the phone with an Alltel Rep and The HTC Touch Diamond is launching next week on Alltel – there is even a page on the Alltel site for it. The rep hadn’t even heard of the Touch Pro. So I hung up and called again and the next rep who picked up hinted indirectly that they will have the Touch Pro and it is undergoing testing now but he couldn’t disclose when it releases or what the cost will be. For a change Alltel is going to get some latest phones! Hopefully they are priced decently. The plans are nice. 69.99 for 500 minutes, unlimited data. 40$ for the second line sharing the minutes, unlimited data. Plus if you are at the University of Virginia you get 15% off.

Here are more rumors

After I destroyed my phone in the washing machine last year, I’ve been using a really old very outdated phone, whose battery is now dying, and it is time to upgrade (contract over too). I’ve been salivating over the new HTC Touch models and I just confirmed with an Alltel representative that Alltel is actually getting the HTC Touch Pro. There is no official date yet but it is coming soon.